Baseball teams will do anything to try and snap out of a losing streak. Some hold closed-door meetings. Some shake up the lineup. Some just don’t do anything and wait until they play the Cubs next (zing!).

The Pirates? Well, they did run into the Cubs as an added bonus, but they also decided to start growing some crazy ‘staches and had the entire team hike up their socks for the first two games of this homestand. Both ended in victories, a nice change after a terrible road trip. You can see Andy rocking the new look above, and RumBunter has some close-ups of more staches (click at your own risk).

I expect to see the socks and ‘staches again tonight, and maybe even longer if the Bucs keep winning.

Tonight’s starters…

Carlos Zambrano: 1-3, 6.12 vs. Zach Duke: 3-5, 5.09

It’s the return of Big Z…hide the Gatorade! Zambrano started off the year in the rotation, and that apparently didn’t go to well, so the Cubbies moved him to the bullpen. He didn’t have a whole lot of success there, either…especially when Garrett Jones and Andrew McCutchen torched him and the rest of the Cubs on their five-hit days. If the Pirates can just get under his skin a bit early in the game, they should be just fine against him tonight.

Duke had a good stretch of starts broken up by a rough outing in Atlanta over the weekend, but hopefully that was just a blip and he’ll be back in form tonight. The Pirates seem confident that he will, because they’re re-arranging the rotation so that Duke is the one who faces off against Stephen Strasburg next week. That seems a bit silly, but I guess it is true that Zach “thrives in big situations,” so whatever.